The Armory Show, March 7 – 10, 2019: Pier 94, Booth P7

In our second year at The Armory Show, we are proud to present Rodrigo Valenzuela's series American-type, recently exhibited at Light Work and concurrently on view at the Orange County Museum of Art. Using a labor-intensive process that the artist calls a "performance for the camera", Valenzuela questions American culture's attraction to simplified representation.

For our second year at Material, Upfor presents new work by gallery artists Ronny Quevedo and Rodrigo Valenzuela, as well as a recent collaboration between Quevedo and Harold Mendez. All three are friends and peers from their CORE Fellowships in Houston, and they share interests in the politics of immigration, undefined spaces that are charged with political history, and an affinity for multidisciplinary methods of making that employ, and question, traditions of objective representation.

Glasstire reviews Rodrigo Valenzuela's Prole and The Unwaged (on view at PAM through April 22 and Art League Houston through May 5); Work in Its Place opens at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Oregon on April 25.

During the recent Material Art Fair in Mexico City, gallery artist Rodrigo Valenzuela spoke with Hyperallergic's Anna Furman about work from the series New Land and Sense of Place.

Using a multi-step photocopying process, Valenzuela projects abstract lines onto unpeopled desert scenes — hinting at houses, governmental offices, and memorial structures yet to be built. Valenzuela’s labor-intensive practices reference the paperwork-heavy process of applying for citizenship in the US, with which he’s directly familiar. He’s now a professor with permanent residency, but when he first moved to the US in his 20’s, he was an undocumented construction worker. He spoke to Hyperallergic about growing up in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, reckoning with the troubling histories of beautiful landscapes, and reconciling the idealized American Dream with the realities of life as an undocumented person.

Gallery director Melissa Soltesz traveled to Mexico City to present Rodrigo Valenzuela's newest works at Material. The fair's scaffolding brought to mind Rodrigo's 2015 Future Ruins installation at the Frye Art Museum, making it feel like a particularly appropriate venue for his work. Thank you to everyone who came out to this lively fair! Visit our Artsy page for other available works by Rodrigo Valenzuela.

Rodrigo Valenzuela will lecture at Portland Art Museum tonight at 6:00pm. The Museum debuted Valenzuela's latest video work in Labor Standards, which opened in October 2017 and remains on view through April 22, 2018.